Ethan Crane

The question ‘what do you do?’, asked by a new acquaintance and understood to mean, ‘what work do you do to earn money?’, has always annoyed me. Partly, I suppose, because I have never been able to give an answer I like, such as ‘writer’ or ‘astronaut’. But more because of the implication: that paid work is therefore the defining feature of my life, that tells others what kind of person I am. (Sometimes I’ll acknowledge that new acquaintances are just making conversation, but this is usually after I am annoyed, and many hours later.)

I found an interesting explanation for the source of my irritation in a letter written by Hunter S. Thompson in 1958, to a friend who wanted advice on what to do with his life. (The letter is from the fabulous brainpickings.org newsletter, though it was originally from the equally interesting Letters of Note website.) Thompson writes:

Every man is the sum total of his reactions to experience. As your experiences differ and multiply, you become a different man, and hence your perspective changes. This goes on and on. Every reaction is a learning process; every significant experience alters your perspective.

So it would seem foolish, would it not, to adjust our lives to the demands of a goal we see from a different angle every day? How could we ever hope to accomplish anything other than galloping neurosis?

Which I take to mean: to answer the question ‘what do you do?’ with the simple statement of your job title, to think of yourself as mainly a teacher or a banker or a fireman is to diminish your sense of yourself.

When you were young, let us say that you wanted to be a fireman. I feel reasonably safe in saying that you no longer want to be a fireman. Why? Because your perspective has changed. It’s not the fireman who has changed, but you.

I see this in some of the book designers for whom I sometimes do freelance work. At the start of their career they were delighted to be a book designer, a highly-prized job – but after months, years, the job title means little to them but the payment of a salary. And yet this is the career that they have bound themselves to, with little option for development unless they strike out into something different – in other words, give up their career.

For Thompson the goal should be not a particular job or even a particular goal:

To put our faith in tangible goals would seem to be, at best, unwise. So we do not strive to be firemen, we do not strive to be bankers, nor policemen, nor doctors. WE STRIVE TO BE OURSELVES.

For me this is getting to the source of why satisfaction and self-esteem will never be found in a career, because paid work for an employer will always define the limits of how you can personally develop. And so Thompson’s advice is less about careers than about asking yourself what kind of person you want to be.

As I see it then, the formula runs something like this: a man must choose a path which will let his ABILITIES function at maximum efficiency toward the gratification of his DESIRES. In doing this, he is fulfilling a need (giving himself identity by functioning in a set pattern toward a set goal) he avoids frustrating his potential (choosing a path which puts no limit on his self-development).

And there’s the crux. Is it worth giving up what I have to look for something better? I don’t know—is it? Who can make that decision but you? But even by DECIDING TO LOOK, you go a long way toward making the choice.

(The original letter on Letters of Note seems to have disappeared from the site… but you can read more of the letter on this brainpickings.org post.)

In a Granta article from 2009, Peruvian author Daniel Alarcón discussed the rampant state of book piracy in Peru. If you think the present day electronic copying of ebooks is a problem, this is nothing to the large scale copying of physical books in Peru: a new book by bestselling author Paul Coelho was widely available on street corners before it was even in the shops.

Alarcón, a newly published author at the time, lamented the loss of royalties when he found his book had been pirated. But at the same time he acknowledged that piracy was also a badge of honour – an author whose new book was not pirated had somehow failed.

It made me think how I would feel if my (as yet unpublished) books were pirated. And I concluded: I would be delighted. I’d be happy that someone had taken notice, that they’d felt the book was worth pirating. I don’t want to be a full-time writer, to need to make a living from writing – I’m happy trying to find a balance between working for money and the writing work that I do for myself for pleasure (which is pretty much the theme of The Tyranny of Careers in a nutshell.)

Of course in order for a book to be pirated, it must be published in the first place. It is the publisher that has lost the most – it is their decision that your book is worth publishing that encourages the piracy. Philip Pullman recently complained about the loss of earnings for full-time writers, and the unfairness of some readers taking for free what others have to pay for.

These are valid complaints. But even so I want to take Alarcón’s ambiguous view of the Peruvian book pirates as a guide for good writing. I do not want to view any kind of creative work in the same way as work to earn money. As I wrote in a previous post, I think a healthy society is one where art/creative work is a part-time activity undertaken by as many people as possible. I don’t want to write with the expectation of money – if it became a grind I would give it up. If I am never able to earn money to live on from writing perhaps I will only produce a book only once every five years say, rather than every year. This is fine. An every-five-years book will hopefully be more considered and therefore better than an every-year book. It is not like there is a shortage of books in the world to read.

In fact I would go further: if I am not happy for any work I produce to be pirated, if I am not happy to do the work but make no money from it, then it is not work worth doing.

If you’re going somewhere, where are you trying to get to? […] First it’s just getting a gig, then it’s supporting someone big, then it’s being someone big in your own right, and then what? Eventually, surely, the ultimate prize becomes not being famous, becomes regaining some of the dignity and privacy you so happily shed all those years ago. – Miranda Ward

F**k the Radio, We’ve Got Apple Juice is Miranda Ward’s account of the rise and self-propelled fall of UK band Little Fish at the end of the 2000’s, written in collaboration with the band. Little Fish found a kind of fame when spotted during a gig by Linda Perry from 4 Non Blondes, and went on to support Courtney Love and Blondie on tours around the world before recording an album in LA – only to follow this up by moving back to Oxford and recording their next album in their garage. But the book is less a biography of the band than an honest, insightful analysis of what exactly the band wanted from music, and what exactly they regard as success. Alongside this Miranda Ward examines her own motives for wanting to be a writer, and what that even means in an era of wall-to-wall blogging and self-publishing.

What was so refreshing to read here was what felt like sincere honesty in the band and the author’s desire to avoid fame. Whereas it is common to hear musicians and authors say they do not want to be part of the mainstream music or publishing industries, you still always have a nagging feeling that were they to have a hit single or novel they would lap it up and jump straight in to the fame machine. But it feels like a revelation when Little Fish recall that their most enjoyable gigs were the ones they played in Oxford venues to small audiences of appreciative fans – and when keyboard player Ben Walker describes what he now thinks of as success: as simply ‘being able to do interesting things with my time’.  Miranda Ward herself describes being surprised by a perfect day, of spending seven or eight hours writing, going for a swim then having an evening with her boyfriend, and what this means to her:

I don’t want to be a famous author for the fame; I want to be a famous author so that I can structure all of – or as many as can be considered reasonable – days like this. Because this […] is what makes me happy.

This feels exactly right to me. I’d like people to read what I write, because even though I take pleasure from writing itself there seems something missing if no one reads it. But in the end I just want to have the opportunity to go on writing about the things I consider important. This is the kind of life I aspire to in The Tyranny of Careers.

In this manner a fulfilling life is one that is focussed on what Miranda Ward calls ‘sustainable creativity’ – where the purpose of writing or making music or whatever is not necessarily to produce a book or an album, but simply to find a way to fund the continuation of making stuff. And whilst this means making do with less, and creating in a DIY fashion, these were the aspects of creating that made Little Fish feel more successful, rather than less. (In line with the DIY ethos of the book, it was published by Unbound, who raise the money needed to publish by collecting money from subscribers beforehand.)

This is a successful life for me: one of continued sustainable creativity. Highly recommend.

If I see someone doing something skilfully, and I ask ‘how did you learn to do that?’ my favourite answer is ‘Oh, I taught myself’.

Often the ‘Oh’ is said with an element of wonder, as though surprised that they ever acquired this skill. Because anyone who answers this way has learnt because they needed to. And self-teaching is the best kind of teaching.

If you have taught yourself how to make a short film, or design a poster, or play a ukelele, or organise a festival, then you started out with an idea for which you had a passion. And then just went ahead and taught yourself what you needed to know.

This is wholly different from being taught a skill for which you do not have a use, an idea for its use. Imagine a ten-year-old who owned a mobile phone but had no need for communication – to learn how it functions would be laborious and not easily remembered. But my ten-year-old daughter, over-excited at the prospect of owning a phone and desperate to text her friends, learns the functions in no time, because she has a real need for them.

This is the difficulty with formal education – we are often taught skills which we have no great desire to use, and so we learn them laboriously. Education should focus more on cultivating our desires than teaching us facts and figures – the opposite of what Michael Gove, the UK Minister for Education plans to do to education. The essence of teaching is to enthuse children (and adults) to the point that they continue the work in their own time, without need of encouragement or expectation of reward.

You may decide to take a course, to train for a particular skill some way into the process of your idea. But more important was that the idea came first, and you then worked out what skills you needed.

Firstly, apologies to those people who have been following my blog and have not received any updates for a number of months. I’ve been spending the time working on a book that came out of the posts for Semi-Retirement for the Under Twenties, have been caught up in that and neglected the blog.

In the course of researching the book I came across a talk by US artist Austin Kleon, discussing the benefits of sharing your research and progress in writing (or whatever art form you are into) before you actually arrive at the finished artifact. It made me realise that sharing the process of your work was the best way for art to be created in the internet age – because I get so much out of reading about other people’s creative processes, both good and bad (especially bad) and so I shouldn’t be shy of sharing my own.

So I have given this website a makeover, and there is now a page detailing my research for the forthcoming book, The Tyranny of Careers. These posts will be in place of any blog posts for a while, until the book is published – you can sign up to receive the tumblr posts via email, or follow the same posts on Facebook. These posts will also detail the (most likely self-)publishing of the book.